Welcome to the new site
Mon Apr 14, 11:37 AM
We hope you can join us in our effort to hold on to this irreplaceable library.
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Stay tuned.
— Thy Hoang
I respectfully dissent.
I appreciate those who feel that the current Kent Memorial Library building is much too architecturally interesting to be torn down. Not long ago, I was one of you. I asked to be placed on two consecutive library study committees with the intent of saving this building. Ironically enough, it became evident that the things that make this building so interesting are also the things that make it functionally destitute. Its large plate glass windows and center atrium make it energy inefficient and are in violation of the Model Energy Code. The concrete ramps that connect the six seperate levels are not ADA compliant and do not even allow two people to pass each other in a comfortable manner. The historical room was an afterthought and does not adequately protect our historical collection. It is a physical challenge to even get to the buidling due to the pitch of the front driveway and the distance from the parking lot. From day one, the flat roof collected and leaked water onto the book collection. This list goes on and on and on.
While I am not an architectural scholar it seems to me that an architecturally significant municipal building should seamlessly blend function and form. Great architectural art should also serve a practical function. Suffield deserves a functional library and it is no secret that the current building does not meet the barest of standards. Clearly, as a municiple library, this was not one of Platner’s best efforts.
Suffield has had three separate and highly qualified committees study the feasibility of renovating and adding on to the existing Building. The subsequent committees were formed with the specific intent of saving the existing building in crontravention of the previous committees. All independently found this to be an unworkable solution and have separately came to the conclusion that the existing building should be razed and a new one built in its place. As stated earlier, the architectural uniqueness of this building is also its undoing. Its six separate levels make it impossible to integrate an addition in a functional and aesthetically pleasing manner. Further, once the building has been retrofitted, remodeled and reworked to correct the plethora of functional deficiencies, specifically those involing the ADA and the Model Energey Code, it will have lost its existing architectural character. Nobody wins if the end result is a “saved” Kent Memorial Library with diminished functionality inside and an architecturally compromised exterior.
We have tried to save this buidling again, and again, and again and have come to the reluctant decision that it is not worth saving. Some may say that Platner designed a beautiful building. What he did not design, however, is a functional municipal library. Unfortunetly, it needs to be both.
— Mark O'Hara · Fri Jun 13, 10:48 AM · #